


Atlas of One's Heart

by Kurokoo



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Aftermath of character death, Angst, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Implied/Referenced Suicide, John Watson Dies, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Post-Reichenbach, can be read as platonic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-23
Updated: 2020-11-23
Packaged: 2021-03-10 03:28:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,414
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27676747
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kurokoo/pseuds/Kurokoo
Summary: In the aftermath of John's death, the great Sherlock Holmes doesn't know what to do with himself.
Relationships: Sherlock Holmes/John Watson
Kudos: 34





	Atlas of One's Heart

**Author's Note:**

> wrote while listening to [cigarette ahegao (penelope scott)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5za9dmRgajs)

Moriarty would have liked it.

He would have called it funny. Ironic. A real Romeo and Juliet story, the star-crossed lovers bit so very heavily outweighed by the tragedy. Sherlock really doesn’t feel the same about it at all.

But then, Moriarty would have liked that as well.

His fingers brush feather-light over the binding of a book. The _Geographers' A–Z Street Atlas_ , he thinks hollowly, pulling it out to examine it as if it means anything anymore. Even if he knows it does. Now it’s much more than what brought an end to the mystery of the book cypher. Now its shiny cover mocks him beneath dim, dust-settled lights, and his fingers curl around it tighter. He doesn’t know what he wants to do with it, but reading isn’t even worth considering.

He stares at the book again, flips through it nonchalantly, and turns, hurling it at the wall with all of his compressed rage and hurt. It drops with a dull thud, staring up at him with vitriol. He can’t tell whether it’s the book’s, or his own reflection.

He meant for it to cure the ache in his chest, but it only coils tighter, nearly drawn taught. Sooner or later it will snap, and he’ll follow willingly. He should have known it wouldn’t have helped. He should have cared that it didn’t.

Sherlock draws his knees closer to his chest, long limbs wrapping around himself tightly, and stares at the light mark left on the wall blankly. He doesn’t move to pick it up.

He wonders if, in another ten or fifty or hundred years, someone else will move in and wonder where that mark came from. Maybe it won’t even be there anymore.

~~~

The text had come at 5:48 a.m., but Sherlock didn’t get the notification until several hours later.

First of all, his cell service had been shitty—apparently MI6 had enough resources to create weapons of mass destruction, but not enough to get him a phone with data roaming. He’s already at his hotel when the message arrives, and doesn’t even get to enjoy a moment sitting in quiet contemplation on the couch when he’s up and moving again.

 **[Mycroft Holmes]** You need to come back.  
**[Mycroft Holmes]** Now.

Sherlock is on a plane due London before he even registers that, technically, his mission isn’t over yet and he may have just blown his cover ten times over.

He _registers_ that he doesn’t really give a damn.

~~~

They take him to the place it happened. “He was right on the spot you were, you know,” Molly whispers, her light tone woven through with sympathy. Her soft words sound too quiet to him, and the teenagers laughing ’round the corner are too loud. Everything else is too repulsive for daring to exist when John does not.

“It seems he remembered,” Mycroft comments with a twinge of disheartenment that doesn’t usually find its way past his lips. “It was two years. I thought he wouldn’t…I thought he would have forgotten.”

He wouldn’t have. Sherlock knew that, and yet there it was. The last piece of John, and Sherlock thinks numbly about how it must have felt to scrape him off the ground. It’s awful, but after John being alive, the second thing he wanted was to have been the one doing it. He couldn’t be there in his final moments, but maybe he could have been there in the end.

Did it really even matter? Either way, he would have been too late. His brother leaves the room before the thought does his lips.

Molly shakes her head at him, and he wonders whether it’s affirming or yet another mistake he has made. She doesn’t say, but he thinks he knows which.

~~~

“None of us thought it would happen.” Mrs Hudson’s words are nearly lost to him as he absently rubs at the armrest of the hemp sofa. “We thought he was doing well, I tell you. Better. Even if he never really visited me.”

His eyes flicker automatically to the evidence of disturbance that litter the room. A disrupted layer of dust settled on the windowsill, his perfectly made sheets, John’s ruffled ones laying on the floor.

He can’t blame Mrs Hudson. She sees but does not observe. Sherlock observes but cannot see.

A muffled sniff snaps Sherlock out of his stupor, and he glances over. Mrs Hudson is braced against their kitchen table, silent tears slipping out. Her eyes are screwed shut and he freezes, brain spinning to try and calculate his next move before coming up completely blank. For the first time in his life, he has an equation in front of him and no clue how to solve it.

(Well, not the first time. And wasn’t he slipping up now, the great and mighty Sherlock Holmes, who thought he had everything and ended up with nothing.)

“Mrs Hudson,” he says placatingly, hoping it comes out more comforting than condescending. He only has a penchant for the latter, after all.

“I never had children,” she murmurs, bringing her hands up and almost slapping away the tears. “Frank was always away or busy and, of course you know, he was only forty-five. When he died, I mean.” (And John was only thirty-five. His lifespan wasn’t meant to be cut off so abruptly; he didn’t deal in drugs. Sherlock begins to wish he was right now.) “You and John, you were my sons.”

“Mrs Hudson,” he repeats, but she straightens and moves closer.

“And now he’s gone.” He tries to maintain eye contact but breaks it off as his flicker too quickly. A burst blood vessel, swollen pink edges, the way she squeezes them shut. She’ll be putting in eye drops soon. He doesn’t want to know, but his brain is a machine without an off switch and it will run until he’s nothing but a battery long since dead. It feels like he just might reach that soon. “Sherlock, you’re all that’s left. All I have left.” Besides Margaret, because they have tea together every Thursday and he’s sure it’s lovely. But he knows there’s a time and a place, and there was a person who taught him that too. She ploughs on, oblivious to his thoughts. “Don’t leave. No matter what.”

He blinks and clears his throat futilely. “Of course I won’t. Why would I do that?”

She shoots him a knowing look and covers his hand with her leathery one. “Sentiment, dear. Happens to the best of us. Seems John left you with even more than his worldly possessions.”

_His worldly possessions._

But there was no note. Mycroft said…

A small, foolish part of him wishes that, for once, Mycroft is wrong. That even if Sherlock hadn’t deigned John any sort of message ( _why didn’t you? I thought you saw through all thirteen possibilities, Sherlock. Are you telling me you missed the most important one?_ ), John might have done differently. John did things differently than people like him and people like Sally Donovan.

Again, he wishes he had just put aside his asinine misgivings and sent John a goddamn text or letter or smoke signal. Anything to give hope to a man who had been starving for so long, nobody could tell whether his ribs were meant to be sticking out or not.

Mrs Hudson bustles out after setting a set of tea down in front of him, and he almost ignores her before something stops him and he gives her a stiff nod. He stares straight ahead again at the bullets still nestled in the walls of the flat and tries arduously not to think about whether John had done the same.

Had he traced the edges of the punctured wallpaper with a mind that traced Sherlock’s time in his life? Had he fondly recounted the exasperation and burst of panic he’d undoubtedly felt that night? Or had his mind just been a recently-wiped slate, unable to function without one half of its gear?

Tonight, Sherlock is the latter of them.

He turns the telly on with a flick of the remote so fervent it might be the gun he aimed at Moriarty. (It doesn’t have to be. After all, he’s already killed someone.)

It drones on dully through the night, and doesn’t turn off even when his head slides down the side of the chair in a fitful grasp at sleep.

~~~

The days turn long, melting together like sheets of mud sliding against each other in a riverbed. This must be what it had been like for John, he thinks, yanking the fleur-de-lis curtains shut harshly. John had been the one to thrust them open in the mornings, saying their flat was macabre enough with all the murder cases corrupting the air without adding gloom as well. Funny, since John is now the cause of their so-called macabre air.

Mycroft visits twice a week, out of sentiment he claims not to possess. Sherlock used to be like that, but with sentiment clawing at him day by day and trying to pour itself down his throat, it’s not like he can. Most days Sherlock bores a hole into the wall with his gaze and Mycroft bores a hole into Sherlock boring a hole into the wall with his gaze, and their droll little game goes on until he gets up to leave. Mrs Hudson does her customary fussing, Lestrade seems to repeat John’s eulogy every time he visits, and after a week their kitchen finds a nice little job as a meth lab again.

An intervention is only as good as how much the subject wants to change, and Sherlock would like nothing more than to lose himself to kidney-destroying bliss. Molly Hooper nearly faints and despairs at his blood tests, and Sherlock despairs in general. Neither of them really get any reprieve. It seems to be a pattern with those who care about him, he thinks as his head lolls back against the cushions. He wonders deliriously whether the couch below him feels any pain. _Your lab used to be pristine, and now it’s addled with drugs._

Slowly, his body regains the strength his mind still lacks. It used to be the other way around, but now he finds it hard to jam his broken thoughts together long enough to achieve coherence. It could be the near-overdose from yesterday night (or was it this morning?), or it could be that grief has not only decapitated his heart, but also burnt it to ashes scattered the day he came back to 221B Baker Street.

Sadness shouldn’t be so poetic. It’s just a numb, flat pain that constricts his breathing and turns his lungs into a rattling ECMO. But it’s also what drives him to finally visit John’s room, untouched since its owner’s loss.

Out of either respect or an inability to, Mrs Hudson hasn’t even entered John’s room. The closed curtains, fallen clock and twists of linen lying in a heap on the floor say as much. The room gives off the scent of melancholy and the saudade of a man long gone. Sherlock kneels slowly and examines the clock face. It’s broken, the arms stuck at 10:12. He wonders whether it was a.m. or p.m. when it stopped ticking. He doesn’t know, he realizes, and he’ll never know because nobody knows. It had stopped long ago, and out of respect, no one even attempted to check on it until it had already ceased to function.

When the door shuts quietly behind him, the covers are tucked in over nothing and the clock sits on the drawer, patiently waiting for repair that will never come.

~~~

John H. Watson’s funeral sees the return of many old friends and family.

They linger and speak solemnly during the reception, offering sad utterances and proclamations of the man’s greatness amid tears that roll down cheeks and the nothing that rolls out mouths.

Harry and Clara Watson make an appearance. Death, apparently, brings people together more reliably than life, as Harry sobs into her wife’s shoulder and even bothers to look at John when he is dressed and packed neatly into a coffin. Her addiction will either be fed or quelled by the loss of her brother, and Sherlock would have been able to tell which with a quick glance at the state of her hair.

Alas, Sherlock Holmes could not be counted among those returned old friends. The funeral was held in the afternoon, and the drug-hazed stupor he’d fallen into does not release him from its coiling clutches until evening.

 _Even the sun’s rays can’t pierce through the mountains blocking its way_ , he thinks of the sunset deliriously, and then, _What the hell am I saying? There are no mountains in London._

Its gentle warmth is unable to reach him through the squat buildings littering the neighborhood. He sits seeking glimpses of its path down until the moonlight sneaks in to stroke his hand instead.

It is the only thing that can find him anymore, it seems—and what a pity, as it does not possess sunlight’s comforting touch.

Still, he leans into it as it cuts an ethereal triangle into his palm, until his head drops and the thoughts of what lies beyond the starlight John has escaped to wash out of him. That is even more untouchable than the sun.

~~~

There has to be a letter.

That’s the only thought in his mind, bouncing around and hitting nerve endings like they’re buttons until he’s scrambling madly around the apartment.

John was a creature of sentiment (Sherlock hates how he’s gotten used to the past tense), and there was nothing he was more sentimental about than life. Especially his own. Especially Sherlock’s. The probability that he left some kind, any kind, of message is high, he thinks, factoring in what the weather might have been like when John had arrived at the conclusion that jumping off the rooftop was his fate to carry out.

The probability that it will fix Sherlock is low, but if he can’t stitch himself back together he’ll take a painkiller until he can or dies from the infection. (It might just be pouring salt into the wound, but man has a certain threshold for pain and he thinks he may have already reached it.)

His ears pick up a low whir when he springs up, probably from one of the cameras Mycroft’s undoubtedly installed. The single motion carries more energy than any action he’s taken for three weeks. His muscles ache with the effort, but he ignores it, as physical pain of this scale is an unnecessary thing to even consider.

Sherlock doesn’t pause when his phone rings as he rips at upholstery, sends papers flying into the air like his father’s hat on a windy day, and yanks drawers open so furiously one might think they’d said something rude about his mother. Finally, he slumps into his chair again, chest heaving. The apartment looks as though it’s been attacked by either a poltergeist or the American military, with clothes and cloth and various body parts strewn across the floor. His eyes trace the frankly disgusting shrivelled head on the coat rack before jerking away, resolutely refusing to think of John unable to get rid of it and letting it fester in their refrigerator instead.

He should have just thrown it away. Now the air is permeated with the stench of decay, but even when it nearly chokes him he realizes that he, too, is unable to toss it out.

The apartment has been upturned, an unruly mess laying wherever one cared to look. And still he hasn’t found a letter.

Have his calculations been wrong a second time?

Sherlock can’t stand the thought that John is both the easiest and hardest person to predict. His trust in himself jumped and splattered on the ground with John, and now he really feels like an amateur in speculation with watery desperation oiling his gears.

He lets himself sag and wearily reaches for John’s med kit propped up by his side, the last untouched item of a dead man’s belongings. His belongings, now, besides all the cash assets granted to Harry.

It’s a bit heavier than it should be, and he frowns, grunting more out of a need to grunt than strain. Inside are standard items—aspirin, bandages, gloves, antibiotic ointment—yet it weighs more than it reasonably should.

He lifts the box again and studies it critically, examining balance, the contents, how it connects to John’s psyche, nods once, and unceremoniously tips it upside down. Its contents crash onto the floor, and if its owner were here, Sherlock would probably be hearing an indignant “Oi!” and a lecture. Instead, he sifts through the items with his foot. As expected, the heaviest things are the compresses, even dry. The kit itself, however, still weighs heavily in his hand when he tests it.

The tightness in his chest is either part of the sentiment he gained alongside John’s possessions or a heart attack, and at this point he thinks he much prefers the latter. His hands feel along the walls of the kit until the false bottom is lifting and he tosses it aside, nearly shoving his face in.

Inside rests John’s beloved army-issue SIG Sauer, P226 if he can remember correctly (and of course he can. Maybe). Technically it was illegal for him to keep it, but Sherlock didn’t mind, and now he minds even less. There isn’t anyone left to persecute for it, anyway.

Inside the barrel rests a wisp of paper, and he draws it out carefully. It’s too small to contain much except whatever writing John managed to squeeze in within its confines, but then again, he was never one to write winding literary masterpieces. More like forcing himself through high school-level classics for a good hour before giving up in favor of a newspaper.

Sherlock lifts it out almost reverently, smoothing it down on the arm of his chair and squinting at the messy words. _At least a month and a half old, words written with a tremulous hand, writer’s just drank some Becherovka,_ he thinks automatically. Then remembers that addiction runs in the Watson family and promptly wishes he hadn’t.

_I wrote this letter for a sick bastard who’s now dead, so if you’re reading this, you’re not meant to. Greg or Mrs Hudson, I love you, now stop._

_I thought about using this in my suicide, but it wasn’t poetic enough. Why not take my own life from the roof that took my will to live instead? Now, isn’t that something worthy of literary analysis._

_‘It’s unfair that he died without thinking of how I would feel.’ That’s what I thought. You’re a selfish prick, but I always knew that. Guess we’re not so different after all._

_I feel like I’m writing my valedictorian speech. Fake, but expected. Of course it was. Goodbye._

~~~

In this kind of story, there is only one ending left. He’s in a room with nothing but the wind howling in his ears and the city sprawled before him, concrete hands beckoning him forward and holding him in equal measure.

Distantly, he thinks about how said room was constructed—brick by brick, painstakingly built by Moriarty’s careful plans. He thought he’d been navigating streets, but it was just a one-way to a dead end.

This is the second time he’s stood on this roof, the second time his coat has tasted the bite of the cool air. There’s some minute differences, though. The early morning air is zesty and sharp instead of afternoon-clogged, and, of course, there is nobody panting into a phone held to his ear. Moriarty’s body isn’t cooling behind him. Nobody is threatening him but himself.

Sherlock takes a deep breath, wobbles on the ledge for a second, and jumps—

Back onto the safety of the rooftop. The plunge is what Moriarty wants him to take, and life is what he chooses to.

A part of him—the romantic, the hopeless, the lonely man who has just lost his best friend, wants to do it. Wants to obey his fate and meet John in the afterlife.

But Jim Moriarty is no William Shakespeare, and Sherlock would rather live for John than die for him. He opens the rooftop door and descends the stairway. His urge to plummet and crash into the ground doesn’t follow.


End file.
